Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Did anyone catch this on youtube?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lud1q...related&search

It's running a Stirling engine.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

That is awesome. And the best part is, he is still working on his cure for cancer rather than turning greedy and trying to make all the money possible off of his new invention.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

I am impressed but the issue I have is how much energy is he putting into the system to create the flame. It seems to me that without the effency noted for this process it isn't that big of a breakthrough.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Yeah, I've been trying to find out that question too. No where does it say how much power is radio freq generator uses. If it uses more than it produces, it's not really that energy savings. However it's still pretty crazy I must say.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Would it be "pretty crazy" if it used less than it produced? ;)

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

no that would be "very crazy" as it is impossible.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

its not impossible. this machine is supposedly releasing stored chemical energy in the salt water. meaning you just need to input enough energy to release it.
just like cars that use the spark plugs to release the chemical energy stored in gasoline.

correct me if i'm wrong

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Conservation of energy is a physical law that says that energy can not be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.

While you are correct that a chemical reaction can seem like new energy is created you must think about the initial cost of the energy. In the case of the car gasoline, an amount of energy was put into the fuel to let you burn it. The drilling for crude, transportation, and refinement, should all be accounted for when discussion the efficiency of an energy source. But it is still the case that Ein will always be greater then Eout. The real challenge is to find processes which Ein ~= to Eout.

Looking at the microwave generator using salt water, it is a process which could be optimized because salt water is essentially free (if ocean salt water works) but I still want to see the power required in the microwave generator to produce "X" amount of heat. Until then the jury is still out on this technology.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Unless something completely novel and previously unsuspected in the history of chemistry is going on, you're wrong. Salt water is not a fuel like gasoline. There's no stored chemical energy in it. It's more like the ash produced by burning hydrogen.

This machine is merely using RF energy to dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen. In order to do that, it must supply at least as much energy as one can get by recombining them. This process has at least one advantage over straight electrolysis: it has no electrodes that corrode and require maintenance. So if it's efficient enough, it might be a reasonable way to produce hydrogen for use as a fuel. (The next step to solve is then separating the hydrogen from the oxygen, and the step after that is storing the hydrogen.)

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

so the question is does salt water even contain any stored energy in the first place
if it did then it may surpass the amount of work done by his machine. just like car engines put out more than enough power to fire spark plugs.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Our local newspaper (I live in Erie, where this work is being done) did a story on the machine.

I know its not the most scientific answer in the world but the Erie Times News said the machine used the same amount of energy as one household lightbulb. Vague I know, but its the best I can offer.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

If that's the case, then it sounds like it will be the leading power source. If not, then eventually it will as technology becomes smaller and more efficient. It's even better that he does want to continue working on curing cancer.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

none the less, that is pretty cool to see.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

After considering it for a while, I realized that the flame looks a lot more like burning sodium than burning hydrogen. My use of the word "merely" was probably a mistake.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Good catch. Doesn't "real" hydrogen burn with a faint blue, almost invisible flame?

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

I just have a couple of questions that I don't know if anyone could answer:

Why is it necessary that the "invention" use salt water? I could see that the radio waves could be inducing some kind of current or something like that, which would require dissolved ions of some kind to make the solution conductive.

Which begs the second question- doesn't chlorine have a lower (or is it higher- I don't remember) reduction potential then oxygen? Meaning that if it was electrochemical (which would explain the necessity of the salt), the products would be chlorine and hydrogen? The chlorine gas could also explain the yellow flame, although I'm not exactly sure which color excited chlorine atoms produce.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

From the original article:
As you can see, there is a disappointingly small amount of real explanation as to how exactly this process works.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Bah! This invention is NOTHING next to the perpetual motion cold fusion carburator that I have developed! I can get 250 miles per gallon from a Hummer using just discarded dish soap and hamster saliva as fuel and emitting only lightly scented fairy farts as exhaust. I could tell you about it, but the oil companies have already sent hit men to sabotage my operations using government technology obtained from the Alien craft stored at Area 51.

Either that, or it is a case of reporters without a science background being asked to cover a science story and not having the slightest clue what kind of questions to ask. Just another reason why FIRST matters.

"Imagine that... hamster saliva as the ultimate clean fuel!"

Sigh... I should be doing something useful right now....

Jason

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Come now, they must have had some scientific background. I mean, they managed to find a polymer engineer to exclaim the amazingness of an obscure RF based electrolysis machine. They could have asked an entomologist after all.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Well, I'd bet a lot of the reporters did know what questions to ask but there was no point in asking them because the target audience with these stories were local people who wanted an alternative way to power their car and wanted to know what the benefits of this innovation could be, not how it works. The point is, even if the reporters had asked the questions, the answers would have ended up on the editing room floor because the target audience wouldn't care, or worse change the channel.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

There's some info here:

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directo...ng_Radio_Waves

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Yeah, it is wonderful that he is trying to cure cancer and all, but doesn't it raise anyone else's hackles that Kanzius says if someone wants to buy up the rights to the technology, that would be fine ?

I mean, It seems to me that if they find a way to improve the efficiency of the machine, so that it COULD possibly solve the world's soon-to-be energy problem... That would be a much more worthy and noble goal than curing cancer.

If you think about it logically, selling the product for "free energy" to fund cancer research would be bartering the fate of a world away for the fate of the small percentage of the world's population that has cancer (of which Kanzius is part), not a good idea. I don't know, it can actually sound sort of selfish depending on how you look at it...

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

When it comes down to it, he probably doesn't know anything about working with that stuff. When I see it, between his knowledge and experience, it was probably in his best interest to continue with his goal to cure cancer. The stirling engine was out of his field of study, let alone his goals. I just hope he sells the rights to someone who will do the right thing with it.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

He has said in a number of reports that he wants to make sure that the technology is not shelved by a large corporation who just calls it not feasible when it truely could be done. The reason he wants to give up rights to this technology is to let someone who has expertise in energy work on it while he continues his work in cancer research (which has been ongoing for years now).

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

It's like, why stop working against cancer when I've put so much time in. It was just easier for him to stay in his field of study.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

What a lot of you are missing is that this is completely bogus. Yes, he gets a flame from salt water, but the power produced by that flame is only 70% or so of the power required to generate the radio waves. There is simply no significant power stored in salt water.

Don't believe me? Think about it this way:

Mixing hydrogen and oxygen together to make water produces energy. Lots of energy, in the form of heat, light, and if the explosion is big enough, sound. Therefore, in order to split water back into hydrogen and oxygen (which can burn), you have to put in an amount of energy equal to that produced when the hydrogen and oxygen mix. Therefore, no usable net energy is stored by the hydrogen and oxygen in water.

So, maybe it's the dissolved salt that is storing energy. Well, it's true dissolving table salt in water is endothermic, in that it takes energy to make the salt dissolve (and therefore water will cool off slightly after you add salt). However, this effect is very, very small, and since the dissolving salt will at most lower the water temperature a degree or two, the most energy you could get out of separating the salt from the water would be enough to raise the water temperature by a degree or two (not the 3000 degrees this guy was seeing).

Okay, so maybe it's the salt itself that is disassociating into sodium and chlorine and producing energy. However, anyone who has ever mixed sodium and chlorine (hopefully from a distance to avoid the explosion) can tell you that mixing the two to produce salt produces a large amount of energy, and therefore separating the two elements requires a large energy input.

In other words, this is a cool parlor trick, and I can't see what useful purpose this would have. There are simpler ways of converting radio waves into heat.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

There is actually a large (and growing) percentage of the population (at least in Europe and the U.S.) that has, had or will have cancer. Over one third of the population of the U.S. will get cancer during their lifetimes.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

For me the kicker is this. What is he DOING with the energy that he is supposedly generating? The stirling engine looks very similar to an engine built by a shop class at our local Junior College. It runs by placing it over a coffee cup of hot water. It also only produces enough power to keep itself turning, at least until the water gets cold, when it stops.

To really demonstrate something like this you need to hook up calibrated power measurement equipment to the microwave input. You also need some way of measuring the power output by the Stirling shaft. If the latter is bigger than the former, then you really have something. If not then you have cool looking way to heat water that you can't even use for coffee.

The thermodynamic properties of water, sodium and chlorine and their reactions are well known. For this to work as described something would have to have been missed by thousands of engineers and scientists over the years. Remember these are people who are actively looking for anomolies. There might be somthing there, but it is probably another incidence of cold fusion.

ChrisH

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Well, if you take the statistics obtained from This site, a reputable journal for cancer clinicians, it says that there are about 1.4 million new cases of cancer developing per year in the united states, In all sites of the body. If you compair that to the current population of the united states, some 301,139,947... it turns out to be a very small percentage indeed... somewhere around 0.46 percent per year. If you take a look at the average American life expectancy, (74 years) ... and ... wait. I am not going to get THAT in-depth =P. I just want to point out that there are a lot less people suffering of cancer than will be suffering through an energy crisis if we fail come up with something soon. But, as was already pointed out, the efficiency of this process right now leaves much to be desired in a perpetual motion machine, (Some 31%, I believe).

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Maybe you should have. From the same website, it indicates that the current death rate from cancer in the US is 1 in 4 or 25% of the current population will die eventually of cancer. Taking your population figure, that's over 75 million people in the US alone who will contract and die of cancer in the current population.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

I'm not sure I want to see an entire gallon of hamster saliva in one place at any time, much less a full tank of it.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

If we really want to solve our energy problems in regards to oil/cars/energy, we first should sit back and examine how our entire society uses energy. To solve any problem in life, you have to go back to the root of the problem and tackle it there.* Every day, tens of millions of people in this country get into several thousand-pound automobiles, and drive long distances to commute to and from work.

Just think about the shear amount of energy used to move that much mass, that much of a distance. It's a lot!

Now think of ways on how we can reduce the overall amount of energy used in the total system. Mass transit, better city planning, and stricter regulations on the minimum MPG for cars will all help our society become much more energy efficient. Of these, the first two are the best long term goals.

Reducing the amount of sub-urban sprawl and converting it into smart-growth with good mass transit (buses, rail, monorail) options are our best long term goals for reducing the amount of energy our country uses. (Besides, mass transit easily run off electricity, and investing in renewable energy sources can make these 100%-complete zero emission solutions.)

And to make mass transit even more efficient, better use of Segways and/or bicycles greatly extend the range and area that is serviceable by mass transit without the need to build additional transit lines. :cool:

We're all FIRSTers. We all build robots, solve hard problems, and complete tasks in a very short amount of time with very little resources. Consider Global Warming the newest game challenge released on Kickoff. We as a community will only be able to surmount this challenge by using the skills and innovative thinking through such programs as FIRST to come up with genuine solutions.


* Trying to 'solve' the side-effects doesn't do anything to help the situation, just in the way that taking painkillers won't fix a problem that needs surgery to correct, or using duct tape to fix a robot that really needs replacement parts. They fix the short-term problems, but they don't do anything to actually anything.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Which is WHAT percentage of the total population of the US (a lot smaller than the world), Tim?

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

That's all good and well to say, but what's going to make it happen?

I note from your profile that you live in S Meriden, CT. A bedroom community, I presume, from it's location. Would you and your family be willing to move into a high-rise in Hartford or NYC to save energy? Would you be willing to spend an additional $3000, $5000 or $10000 on your new car, so that you could maybe save $500 of gasoline per year? How much are people willing to pay to achieve energy independence? That's the big question this country has to answer. Just telling people what they "should" do won't make them do it. Telling people what they "must" do won't be politically acceptable in this country. How do you get people to change their lifestyles?

The only true way to get people to conserve energy, or any other commodity, is to allow or make the price rise to the point where they won't pay it any more. Even with $3.00+ gasoline, most families are spending a smaller portion of their income on fuel than they did in the past. The tremendous price increases have only just begun to catch up with inflation over the past decades.

So how do we do it? Heavily tax gasoline or any carbon fuel so that people have an incentive to conserve? Try getting that through Congress.

I don't have any answers. But you can't rely on just telling people they should do something. The biggest and best hope we have for the future is to make photo-electric generation viable for cost and capacity. We have an incredible amount of sunlight energy that hits this planet every second. We just have to find a cost-effective way of capturing it.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Gah, you're ruining my idealism!

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Global warming problem is greater than any one person, city, state or nation. It affects the Earth as a whole. Thus, the fundamental problem is us, the people. But we are also the solution.

Over the years I have realized that no technology can solve this problem. Technology only follows our lead. So the only true solution is to change our mind set. This is the GREATEST CHALLENGE OF MANKIND.

Hydrogen is not going to "truly" here till 2050; if we think we cav wait that long we are sadly mistaken. Ethanol and biofuels: a lot of pollution comes from fertilizer runoff and quite a few starving people would like to eat corn. When you factor in economics, many of these fuels just can't compete with gasoline.

Few understand the scale of this problem and how it affects every aspect of our life. The solution requires a radical change in the universal principals of mankind. No matter how try to solve this problem, it will radically affect our economy. But the cost of doing nothing will be far greater.

Basically, we, the people, are the core of the problem and a balance must between the economy and the environment must be reached.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

I have a fundamental issue with this.

If he puts a tube of salt water into the RF field, it heats up and produces a burnable gas.

If he puts his hand into the RF field, nothing happens.

Not sure about you, but my hand is mostly salt water.

Wy doesn't his hand produce a burnable gas in the RF field?

Don

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

In our particular case, even though we live in a little residential neighborhood in the center of Connecticut, our house is only a block away from my mother's job (an elementary school), and only a few miles from my father's job (a municipal electric utility company), most of which can be covered by a paved bike trail. When it's not raining or snowing, my mother usually walks to work, and my father will take his mountain bike and has been seriously considering purchasing a Segway to commute.

If my parents worked in Hartford or NYC, they'd probably move much closer to their jobs, if not into the city itself. (Especially since my mother hates driving in highway traffic with a passion, and does everything she can to avoid it.)

$3K yes, $5K maybe. At $3K extra, and with $500 savings per year, you'd pay off the extra costs after six years, and after that would save money. If you put 10-15K miles onto your car per year, it's quite reasonable to have a car for 8-10 or more years, meaning you'd save several thousand dollars over the life of the car.

It's just like the energy-efficient light bulbs. As each of the regular incandescent light bulbs in our house dies, we've been converting them over to the daylight-corrected fluorescent ones. (Except for the halogen ones on dimmers, as you can't put fluorescent bulbs on a dimmer.) Even though they cost more, you get the equivalent of a 100W light-bulb with only 37W of power. Plus, add in their increased lifespan, and you'll save money over the life of the bulb.

When you work out the math, and you can have a net gain in money over the lifespan of the product, it's worth the extra upfront cost.

Lead by example.

There's not much one can do about existing "grandfathered" development, but if city planners across the country all started to develop better planning methods and tax credits to make better use of the land, and encourage better/higher zoned developments around mass transit stations for future growth, then we have started off on the right path.

90 years ago, most towns and cities in this country had efficient transportation networks and city planning. People lived near where they worked, and if they did live in the suburbs, they lived near the train or trolley line. Cars undid all that, for better or worse, depending on your point-of-view. There's nothing wrong with suburbia, as long as it's close enough to a transit line to make it worthwhile.

The challenge for the 21st century is going to be balancing our desire to live out in surburbia with efficient city planning and transportation networks. And the only way to get people to want to do it is by just starting. Cities across the country are expanding their commuter train service, and building light rail networks. Las Vegas recently became the first American city to begin using transit monorails in dense urban areas. Tax breaks for living closer to transit stations help people and businesses migrate back into better, denser, more livable developments.

If our government moved several billion per year from the Hgihway department to Amtrak, we might actually be able to have a decent high-speed rail network. Right now, we are the only industrialized country in the world which lacks a bullet train network that's competitive with airlines for short and medium trips. (I can see where large [rural] portions of our country don't need high speed train service, but certainly corridors like NYC-Chicago-Denver-LA, or from Seattle-SF-LA-San Diego, or DC-Atlanta-Orlando-Miami would benefit greatly from them.)

After all, no matter how much the government throws at expanding our highways, they are always just as crowded and packed as they were before. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, then why do we keep pouring tons of money into highways hoping that each new expansion will be the one to make a difference when they never do?

Brazil is entirely energy dependent because of ethanol-based fuels. They no longer have to import a single barrel of oil to sustain their economy. While fertilizer and run-off are sources of pollution, the United States is one of the largest farming nations in the world. The Midwest is HUGE. Our government also subsidizes farmers who plant way more food than is actually used. Basically, we have the potential to create our own bio-fuel economy.

While bio-fuels may not be the perfect answer (fertilizer and run-off pollutes our water, ethanol doesn't contain the same bang-for-the-buck in the octane department as gasoline), they can solve many of our short term goals. If GM and Ford currently sell Flex Fuel cars in Brazil, why can't they sell them here? If we have the potential to plant vast amounts of corn and ethanol-producing plants in the United States, thus lowering the amount of foreign oil we need to import, is this not a positive and attainable goal?

Would not the improved (though not perfect) carbon emissions also help our country in our quest to lower emissions of greenhouse gases by virtue of the recent G8 Global Warming conference?

Since most of our foreign relations are muddied because of concerns over oil, if we drastically reduce our need for foreign oil, we can better avoid confrontations in the Middle East. Right now the Middle East has one "ace in the hole" over the United States (and the world), and that is that we need their oil. And with China and India fast become large oil consumers as well, we are increasingly going to be fighting over a ever shrinking supply of oil.

I wouldn't be surprised if a large war was to erupt in 50 years over oil supplies, or at the very minimum very tense relations between the countries of the world. Surely, wouldn't the United States rather avoid such a confrontation and seek energy independence as well?


Wow, this turned out to be a long post. :o

But if you read nothing from the above commentary, the only true solution to everything is by tackling the problem from all sides, and taking steps and implementing better solutions from all angles. Right now it doesn't matter what those steps look like, as long as we keep moving forward. As Walt Disney loved to say, "It's time to stop talking and start doing!"

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

No way am I going to make quotes from there.

The countries are actually expecting oil supplies to dwindle in the next 20 years. Knowing our gas consumption, it will be just that long. We don't need to make these the goals for the next 50 years, but the goals for the next 20. What we need to do is to convince the government to start pushing this more. A lot more. They are starting to make ethanol plants, which is one of the first steps. Now they need to push ethanol using vehicles. It will be a slow change. People will be reluctant to go out and willy nilly buy a new car. Especially if they just bought a new one. But what we can do is convince the government to let us trade in gas hogging cars for new ethanol cars. The problem with that is that it will hurt our economy.

It will be a slow complicated change, but that's all the more reason we need to start now.

For now, since it is the summer, there is no reason for many people who live in the city to just ride their bikes or walk all of the time. My friends live 10 miles out of town and they still ride their bikes in all the time. There is no reason for the government to push more to people to ride their bikes and walk around town. Here in Indiana, I see hardly any rail trails. Even when I do, they aren't to long. Heck, I wouldn't mind a rail trail from here in Huntington all the way up to Fort Wayne, I would ride that all the time. Heck, they could connect all of our counties together. You almost can go anywhere from Huntington without going out on a highway. I have ridden along highways on my bike. I always hate doing so. I can guarantee that rail trails do get people out of the cars and and more active. I'm just shocked they don't push those more in some areas.

Well, now I feel like writing a letter or two to our mayor and governor.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Seems to me from what everyone's said that the RF is dissociating the sodium choride, leaving sodium metal in water (highly reactive), resulting in a flame of about that color. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Their Quote, "...send a letter to the editor telling automakers to use their engineers, not their lawyers."

Here is a new hurdle!

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/avp/


There is no such thing as a ZERO emissions vehicle, unless you start the timer after it has rolled of the production line. Manufacturing a car generates quite a bit of pollution. So don't trust the commercials or the media. Maybe the car can suck up the pollution...

Transportation is a good start. But the scale of the global warming problem and the limited time requires us to look at other sources of pollution: power plants, deforestation...

Our future solutions have to be throughly researched and planned and logical. We don't want to create other environmental problems while solving the current ones.
In case of hydrogen, we are not even solving our current problem... If you don't know, Water Vapor is a green house gas!

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

My father tells this story of an emissions testing facility in Los Angeles during the 1970s. They'd hook up some equipment to the exhaust pipe of a car and read out the emissions to make sure they were within legal limits. One particularly smoggy day someone got cute and stuck the test nozzle out the window. The results: the air outside the building failed the emissions test. The cars using that air to run their engines passed.

There are also semi-serious proposals to put catalytic-converter-like coatings on the outside of car radiators to remove pollutants from the air while the cars drive down the highway.

The water vapor content of the bulk of the atmosphere is already in equilibrium at a given temperature. Add more, and more precipitates out. Add less, and there's room for more to evaporate from surface water. Emitting steam from an engine's exhaust does not increase the total amount of water vapor in the air. We can't really affect it much, and it can't be considered a pollutant any more than sand on the beach can be.

Increasing temperature, however, means the atmosphere can hold more water vapor. More water vapor tends to hold in more heat, increasing the temperature. Positive feedback -- make it warmer by a little, and it ends up being warmer by more than you expect. It's an important factor in modeling the climate. But we can't affect it directly; only by manipulating the global temperature through other means can we change the amount of water vapor in the air.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Just a few ideas to throw into the mess:

What about plug-in hybrids? 40-60 miles on all electric range (which satisfies the average person's daily driving needs), you roughly pay about 7 cents a mile when running in electric mode; beyond that the car would run as a conventional series-parallel hybrid.
The technology is available (although this claim is pretty controversial between the people who R&D plug-ins and car companies). I can't remember the exact increase in overall price, but I think it was in the range of $5-7k, which is about what you pay for a lot of fancy creature comforts that most people don't often use in their car (like the sun roof, or fancy navigation system). Plug-in hybrids, in my opinion, seem to be the best option to displacing the consumption of fossil fuels -- that and it would be a good crossover to going back to all electric vehicles :)

By the way, to convert the current US fleet from gasoline to ethanol isn't possible, because we can't produce enough crop to produce enough biofuel.

And lastly, hydrogen isn't a miracle fuel, well it isn't a fuel at all. Fuels is a resource you harvest and refine; hydrogen is just an energy carrier, since we need to extract it from the air or from water. It also takes 3 times as much energy to create hydrogen compared to the same amount of gasoline, as of right now. So hydrogen cars may produce 'zero-emissions' but the pollution is just moved upstream. You also lose energy by having to store it in the high pressure tanks. Quite a few problems and not enough time :(

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

You do know that platinum is probably rarer than oil. And yet the light bulbs are full of mercury. If you don't throw them out correctly you'll end up with a serious problem..
That isn't going to happen anytime soon. There are still some parts of the country where you need a car to get anywhere. It's not a matter of public transportation more than the nearest supermarket is twenty miles away.
I have to find the article but I remember reading that deforestation isn't the problem. The main problem is emissions output.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Deforestation is a huge problem. Tree absorb tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Many forests, especially the rain forests, control the global climate. If the Amazon Rain Forest is gone we are going to have a serious problem. Emissions is big but we can't allow our forests to be destroyed in the background: we will lose the best way to clean up the current CO2.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

I still think it's a bit of smoke and mirrors. I remember reading that you essentially have to repopulate the entire United States with a specific type of tree to even get an offset for a couple of houses in the United States. Once again cutting emissions is the most important factor because otherwise it's not going to be a net gain.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Amazing, but not very efficient, I have been reading up online, and it has been attempted before, but projects have been canceled due to scientists using predictive research and finding out that it is not an efficient way to create energy.... I am sure that with some further improvements, it will maybe be possible for the machine to be more efficient, but for right now I am sure that it has been tried, and since my car still is running on gasoline, has failed. Good invention, and I am sure that it has great potential. On the other hand, i am sure that when coal was introduced, no one thought that something that you dug out of the ground and looked like a rock would become such a huge energy powerhouse (and environmental destroyer) but it did, amazing, and I hope that improvements can be made....

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

I've also seen things that run on milk, peanuts, and certain grains. It's all really amazing. One day I plan on toying with these foods/ substitute gasolines.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Your statements are sort of correct for temperate climates, where the slow growth of trees and smaller amounts of total vegetation in forests means they only create small carbon sinks.

However, in tropical areas, forests have a huge impact as carbon sinks. The forests there contain huge amounts of vegetation, trees and plants grow much quicker, and because of all the vegetation in rainforests, the water vapor from all the plants actually leads to the formation of clouds that block the rays of the sun. It's the tropical rainforests we need the most of any forest on this planet, as they have the greatest impact on global warming.

A recent study (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Th...essment_Report) has shown that over the next fifty years, we can mitigate 10-20% of greenhouse gas emissions simply by reforesting unused land that was previously deforested, especially that of rainforests. Another recent study found that it takes only $90 worth of reforested trees in developing, tropical nations to offset the carbon footprint of an average American citizen, making reforesting land one of the cheapest ways to combat global warming.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

I don't think it had anything to do with a temperate climate. They essentially picked the best tree so it was a hypothetical forest of a single type of tree (Essentially a hypothetical best case carbon sink) . I was just giving the size to give a scale that is involved.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Of course the scale would be huge, but rainforests in general are much more efficient at eating up carbon dioxide than anything you can plant in most of America. (Except maybe Florida.) Here's links to the two sources I was using in my arguments from my previous post:

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/200...GL024550.shtml (This survey was the one that found that "tropical forestation has a large net cooling effect, because of increased cloudiness and because of high tropical growth and sequestration rates", and that there is "little to no net global cooling from tree planting in temperate climates". This is just an abstract of the study; you would need to find a real copy in a library to read it all.)

http://treesftf.org/resources/pops/G...%20edition.pdf (This was the source that stated it takes as little as $90 to purchase 900 trees to plant in tropical areas, to offset all the carbon emissions from a single American. "The mitigation costs through forestry can be quite modest (US$0.1–US$20 / metric ton carbon dioxide) in some tropical developing countries.... The costs of biological mitigation, therefore, are low compared to those of many other alternative measures.")

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_...limate_impacts (I usually don't like using Wikipedia as a primary source, so I back-tracked all the sources there to double check and verify the information. And the result on Wikipedia explains it all quite well.)


Would you happen to have a link to the study you were referring to? What year was it published? (I'd be interested in reading it.)

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I doubt that the reason cars still run on gasoline is because a better alternative is not available, I believe there are OTHER reasons for the lack of change, but draw you own conclusions...

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What i meant was, they were not successful/effective/affordable enough. Also oil companies have a large say in that, is what I think you are saying..... And I totally agree.

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just a random fact but did you know that although the rainforests produce a lot of the earths oxygen, they consume the same amount overall?

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Everyone here should read this: http://www.reason.org/commentaries/d...20060719.shtml

It's sad but it kind of makes sense. Though I still won't condone a Hummer, I just realized that this problem is FAR more complicated than it seems.

As I said before, we are the "problem" and the "solution". There are regular cars achieving 40+ mpg and SUV available from the same manufacturer, yet many buy the SUVs. Everyone from every walks of life has to sacrifice a lot to solve this problem.

A balance between the environment and the economy must be achieved. Right now there isn't any. Thus, economy must pay for the environment that it has trashed.

Best thing you can do right now is CONSERVE.

NOTE: I have read some people's view on this article. Right now Hybrids aren't helping the Earth BUT in a few years they will. But the fact still remains conservation is the best course.

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Here's where a detailed accounting of life cycle emissions gets interesting.

The energy saved over the lifetime of a CF bulb is relatively large compared to an incandescent bulb. If you choose the incandescent bulb because of concerns over mercury in the environment, you use more electricity. If you account for the fraction of electricity produced by burning coal in the US, on average you end up with more mercury in the environment -- in the air -- from the extra coal smoke than there is in a CF bulb to begin with.

And to throw them out correctly you'd probably want to take them to a recycling facility, where the mercury can be recovered, and thus avoid the "serious problem" completely.

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That is exactly what I was talking about. Great article by the way.

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That's pretty much what I eat :ahh: I won't claim to be amazing, but I have been called weird.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

Hey all, I just joined the forums to post on this topic. I think you all are missing the point of this invention. It does not need to be 100% efficient. Hell, if its 70%, thats awesome.

I am a Power Engineer, recently graduated, and I see a different use for this technology, energy storage. As has been stated earlier, a way to efficiently seperate out the oxygen and hydrogen would be necessary, but that could probably be done using a magnetic field above the salt water tank.

Anyways, if generators on a system could always be run at full capacity and selected banks of Fuel Cells with Salt Water batteries placed strategically around the network (Fuel Cells are Very small and easily place almost anywhere). Excess energy on a system, perhaps at night, could be used to operate these RF generators and store up H2 and O into bins to be later used to power a Fuel Cell during Peak Demand.

Right now, there is No real possibility for Energy storage that does not adversely affect the environment. A similar usage like this is done with Hydro power where they pump water up into a reserve lake and open up the generators during peak load. However, Hydro-Electric lakes are defficient in oxygen and kill the local fish and wildlife. This would not have any such side effects, and the only emissions will be salt and water (seperate of course).

Developing this into a cost effective model could revolutionize the Power Industry and allow for greater stability of the Power grid.

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I'm a little lost as to why you would want to use these for power storage. I seems that these RF generators produce power using salt water (if they do). If you used something to create salt water that was then used by the RF during peak hours I could see what the benefit could be. But they are already using hydorgen fuel cells to do this. They use excess power off the grid when usage is down to separate water into H2 and 0 and then turn it back ito electricity during peak usage hours. Of course this isn't geart considering that hydrogen fuel cells are only 50% efficient so a better system could be developed.

In response to another thing. Unlike in a hydrogen fuel cell you don't have a storage state. You aren't turning the electricity into something that can be stored efficiently like chemical energy. It is being turned into thermal energy very directly which through the stirling engine is becoming mechanical. So even if it were 70% efficient (something I find unlikely). The energy it produces can't really be stored as easily as a normal lead acid battery or hydrogen fuel cell.

Back to the discusion above... I don't see why we have to hurt the economy to cause this change to happen. If you look back to a similar situation a few years ago why pollution was a huge problem. Many companies out there didn't want to clean up because they would have to spend money and that would "hurt" the economy. It was the exact same argument for why we needed to keep charging ahead full steam. However the government mandated that these companies had to clean up and instead of a crashed economy we got a new industry becuase somebody had to do the clean up. Yes there are industries that would get hurt but overall it would create more jobs because there would be more work to do.

It will certainly hurt the economy more if we wait for tranportation to get increasingly expensive especially once we hit the brick wall of to oil left although by then the environment will be too far gone for us to help...

I believe they do. Would you spend the extra money to engineer and produce a new engine for a car economy as small as brazil. However even if you did have a flex fuel car, where do you get several gallons of ethanol to put in the car? I haven't driven by a pump lately that has the enthanol option (not to say that it wouldn't be nice and that I shouldn't). That and ethanol isn't really a good solution. You say that we produce much more corn than we use... That doesn't click with me. Why are the farmers growing something they can't sell all of. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of the corn grown anywhere in the world is sold and the farmers that aren't selling it are busy looking for a new line of work.

I agree that everyone has to sacrafice something for the sake of the environment but lead by example. I ride my bike to work whenever I can. The car that I do drive is 9 years old and get pretty good MPG so I'm not encouaging the creation of a new car and I'm not driving the Ford valdes. Most of the lights in my house are CF lights and I still turn them off whenever I leave the room. I'm doing many things to try to limit my carbon foot print but there is always more that I could be doing. I could keep the AC off during the summer since I doubt that I would die of the heat etc...

I still want to know why his hand doesn't light on fire though :D .

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We recently had a presentation from a professor from Purdue. They are working on a way to get ethanol out of cellulose (basic plant cell wall material) working specifically with poplar trees. There is not currently a commercially-viable method to separate the cellulose from the lignen which binds it together.

He said Indiana is currently the 5th largest producer of corn in the US. They are building new plants to extract ethanol from corn - I believe he said 6 new plants are under construction. If they all come online, Indiana will not have enough corn to fuel the plants = they will have to import it. The price of corn and all animal products (meat, milk, eggs) from livestock that eats corn will be going up.

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"If you used something to create salt water that was then used by the RF during peak hours I could see what the benefit could be. But they are already using hydorgen fuel cells to do this."

My idea was, during NON-peak hours, use excess generation to Use the RF Devices to Seperate out the Hydrogen and Oxygen into storage Cells. Then, during Peak load, Use the aforementioned Hydrogen to run a fuel cell. This would be a No-fuel device. It would recreate the water during the fuel cell operation, AND the excess generation from Non-peak load times could be stored in Chemical Form. There would be no cost for Pressurized Hydrogen, or Coal, or Natural Gas (all of which can be used to run a fuel Cell). Its a huge idea if this RF generator works the way I believe it does.

It could be used very versatilely withe Wind Generation, as well as Nuclear Power Plants. Where Wind Power is very volatile, during over generation, the power could be stored, and bled out over time with lower generation to normalize the power output. With Nuclear Gen, the power curve of those Plants is a Straight line. If there is not enough load for their Output, they have to shut down. Why waste the generation? Save it up chemically as such.

I just gave a presentation on future generation and integration of renewable's as well as the environmental impact (or lack thereof besides in manufacturing). Renewables are a great idea, but very impracticle for a stable grid. It will take power storage devices as the one I've mentioned above, along with installation of FACTS devices over every major transmission line along with HVDC redundancy to work reliably, and the Power companies, in this Deregulated market, are not willing to make that type of investment. It would drive their electricity prices to be not competitive.

Re-regulating the market might be a start to fixing that.

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I know what the advantages of using a storage system of some kind cause I have done research into the subject (not as in depth as I might like...) However we have not determined that the RF genorator makes H2 and O. As has already been stated in this discussion it doesn't look like that type of flame and could be something like a sodium and water reaction. In addition it produces a flame which means that an added process of separating the two gasses (if indeed that is what is produced) would need to be added. I agree that if it does do this and is more efficient than electrolosis...

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I'm not a huge fan of bringing back dead threads and please no one flip out at me, but there have been a lot of articles recently about this invention that I thought some here may be interested in...

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07252/815920-85.stm

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007..._from_salt.php

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2...lvania-ma.html

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I would have to say it's a subtle fraud. I can't find any attribution to his name on any website that describes using microwaves to treat cancer even though an article says they licencsed his technology. The best way to tell is to actually contact the people who are actually doing research with microwaves and contact them. I'm sure they'd be really happy to prove that it wasn't his idea.

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Kanzius's Patent Application

Can't get to much more official than the US Patent and Trademark office. He has more patents filed in addition to that if you search.

Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine
 

You'll find a lot of stuff in the US Patent and Trademark office. Not all of it actually works as advertised. That said, I attended a seminar yesterday about using RF to treat cancer. The original method used an invasive needle with a small electrical charge at the end. The RF excited the electrically charged needle tip and heated up the surrounding area, destroying the cancer.. and anything in the area of heating around the tip. This surgeon received FDA approval for that back in 2001, in fact. Problem was it was invasive and all. So he's now doing research to make it non-invasive using nanotubes or gold nanoparticles in the tumor instead of the probe. He also mentioned that with enough RF, you can heat up anything with some molecules with some excitable electrons in it, like metals or nanotubes.

So:
A. The burning salt water or whatever is probably being heated to the point that the water is dissociating into H2 and O2, and then igniting again to form the flame. Plus some sodium in there for the color. I can't possibly believe this is an over unity or even anywhere close to unity process.
B. If he focused enough RF at a tumor he probably could heat it enough to destroy it. However he'd also heat also heat anything on the way in and out and he'd need a heck of an RF field besides. And he'd still have to aim the thing precisely at all the cancerous cells, etc. On the whole I think the talk I heard yesterday is much more on the right track to destroying tumors with targeted nanoparticles. And I really hope this guy doesn't decide that infringes on his patents or something.

EDIT:
He apparently actually mentions working with the folks from MD Anderson here that spoke yesterday. I don't know that I actually heard his name mentioned, however. I have a feeling that he's a little more peripheral to the research than he might be portraying things.

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Well it wasn't in the US Patent and Trademark office. I'm talking about the National Cancer Institute which apparently is a part of the National Institute of Health. Not only that but Im finding researchers who basically want to do the same thing that this guy is claiming to do. Here is a website from MIT:
Website Though I admit I first heard of using infrared and the gold nanoparticles to burn the cancer off.